Time will stop for one second today as horologists bid to realign the clock with the Earth.

The last minute of tonight will be 61 seconds long, in a project that some industry observers are dubbing a ‘leap second’.

The gravitational pull of the Sun and the Moon has left the Earth slightly out of sync

Due to the immense gravitational pull of the Sun and the Moon, the Earth has stepped out of line with International Atomic Time.

Its rotations are a little unsteady as it is known to effectively wobble on its axis, with the effect of the Sun and the Moon as well as the ocean tides all halting rotation by a fraction of a second.

A typical revolution of the planet takes 86,400 seconds, but this has to be increased to 86,401 seconds very occasionally in order to pull the Earth back into line with solar time.

‘Today, time is constructed, defined and measured with atomic clocks that are infinitely more stable than astronomical time,’ director of the SYRTE time-space reference system at the Paris Observatory Noel Dimarcq told AFP.

This evening’s addition of a second will be the 25th time in history that experts have stepped in to alter the Coordinated Universal Time, which stops International Atomic Time and solar time moving too far apart.